


Bury the Hatchet

by Espisayer



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Angst, Blood and Violence, Dark Humor, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, M/M, Minor Character Death, No DSOD, No Death-T, Post-Canon, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, hurt/comfort sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:01:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26362333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Espisayer/pseuds/Espisayer
Summary: Jounouchi finds out exactly what kind of friend Kaiba can be when he needs someone to help him with the blood on his hands. That friend that would help you hide the body, so to speak. Except in this case it's not figurative.
Relationships: Jounouchi Katsuya | Joey Wheeler/Kaiba Seto
Comments: 19
Kudos: 93





	Bury the Hatchet

**Author's Note:**

> There is implied context that this takes place 2 years after Battle City, etc, and Kaiba does not have a terrible relationship with them.

The stench of alcohol mixed with copper and cigarette smoke permeated in the air, coiling like the ashes of rotting bodies up through the bowels of hell. Even they couldn’t pass it through the system.

Everything was fine until it wasn’t.

Not that anything was really fine in the first place. But you have to tell people that, let them think that, or they start giving you these pitying looks that just make you want to crawl out of your skin.

The old man’s moods fluctuated more recently from year to year, month to month, week to week. Usually kept to himself and whatever lowlifes got invited over for a nice, friendly game of cards that ended in the exact same place he’d started:

Drunk, sad, and broke.

Jounouchi had become desensitized to it by now. He didn’t talk about it. His friends couldn’t understand. And they didn’t need to. It was just a waiting game, after all: graduation was just a few months away now and this hunk of flesh that was once a functioning human being spent most days out of the apartment or passed out on the couch, clutching a bottle like a lifejacket.

Jounouchi had the worst luck.

Ruins. That’s what he was looking at. A metaphor for his life, really. An upturned table, forgotten beer cans, various bottles of alcohol in various states of disrepair, half-finished cigarettes and butts scattered like confetti under the tattered couch that was half-draped in the remaining threads of a blanket, turned over so it was nearly one in the same with the TV, and―

The dead body, lying in the middle of the nonexistent divide between the living room and the kitchen. Clutching a piece of broken bottle like a knife.

Jounouchi’s hands burned.

Vaguely, something clattered to the ground beside him, while his brain tried to rewind his life all at once: all together, unraveled at the seams, then stitched back together just to become frayed again. Burned. Bleary-eyed, dizzy, pulse pounding in his head like a ticking time bomb, he stumbled back into counters, a hollow noise. He stared. Hands grasping at air, aching and dripping.

Then desperately patting himself down for his phone. His broken nail gleamed with blood and it smeared over the screen through his contacts. He stopped on Yugi’s name.

No. He didn’t think he’d be able to take the distraught look on Yugi’s face.

Honda, then.

They’d really have each other’s backs in prison, wouldn’t they?

_No. I can’t._

Something in Jounouchi’s brain snapped and he ended up messaging Yugi after all. His erratic breathing was nothing more than static as he typed out a message.

Slowly.

_Hey, Yugi_

_I need a huge favor_

Calmly.

_I need Kaiba’s number_

_Don’t ask_

_It’s really important_

Kaiba.

He wasn’t a friend.

Well… Not really. Maybe.

That wasn’t important right now. What was important was that Jounouchi couldn’t think to save his life and Kaiba was the only person he could remotely imagine might be able to handle this… problem.

His heart nearly shot out of his chest into a bloody heap at the knock on the door 30 minutes later. “ _Holy shit_ ,” Jounouchi breathed. He couldn’t breathe. _He actually showed up_.

The actual bloody heap lying on the floor was suddenly bathing in a new artificial light now, dim and yellow under the ceiling lamp, and that light stuck like a knife in his brain: he hadn’t thought this through.

The icy air rushed through the crack in the door when he fumbled the lock and handle open.

Honest-to-god Kaiba Seto was standing in his doorway. All legs and stiff as a board and sharp eyes and that familiar “this better be fucking important” glower―he didn’t have time to appreciate that it abruptly morphed into an unfamiliar, cold shock when Jounouchi yanked him inside the apartment entryway by the arms, then slipping aside him to yank the door shut.

“What―”

“Listen―I’m sorry―I know, I know I didn’t tell you everything over the phone,” his chest was heaving and he couldn’t focus his eyes in the dull light, “but I just―I panicked―and _I know_ you can't fuckin' stand me! I fuckin’ know, so don’t even start―but I guess you showed up, didn’t you? You’re actually fuckin’ here―”

His heart stopped with a short-circuit when Kaiba suddenly grabbed him by the shoulders and fixed him with a hard stare―he couldn’t make out his expression, exactly, but―“Jounouchi, _breathe!_ ”

Oh. Right.

His vision went blurry for a second. It hurt to breathe.

“What happened to you?”

Kaiba’s voice was hard and his face was a mask, but his eyes were wild. Jounouchi wondered if he’d connected the dots yet. His throat was constricted and his lips were dry, so instead of answering he just found himself pulling Kaiba into the apartment.

It was just a few steps. Not much left to the imagination.

Jounouchi watched his eyes immediately fixate on the corpse in the middle of the floor―a shade of color possibly drain from his face―and throw a fleeting glance at Jounouchi and then back to the room.

And… silence.

Complete and utter silence that itched underneath Jounouchi’s skin like prying insects and he felt like he might burst at the seams. “It just happened,” he heard himself saying. Kaiba’s eyes flicked back to his own, with a remarkable lack of anything Jounouchi could read. Then again, he could barely think. “He’s usually passed out by the time I get home. This time he was throwin’ stuff. I mean, that’s not new, but he usually can’t aim worth a shit, and this time he hit me―and I didn’t―I don’t know! He was swinging at me with a piece of glass―and I just―I snapped!”

Static echoed in his ears as he stared Kaiba down, waiting for him to say something, anything―but Kaiba was a statue, so what was that look? Horror? _Kaiba_ was horrified with him?

“ _What was I supposed to do?_ ”

This time he shook Kaiba by the arms, even though his body felt like a balloon and he could barely feel his legs―and all the sudden something feral in Kaiba’s eyes snapped him back to the present.

“You're a fucking idiot.”

The air released from his lungs. Kaiba grabbed his wrists, peeling them off his person. Jounouchi jerked his blurry gaze back upright. “You can’t even clean the blood off your hands first! You’ve probably got your prints on everything in this fucking apartment!”

Jounouchi’s mind was blank. He hadn’t even realized his hands were bloody until now: oozing, he followed the trail from a gash in his left hand, dripping down his arm, over Kaiba’s long, otherwise pristine fingers ensnaring his wrists, and―the big red handprint on his navy coat. Kaiba had let go of him to angrily discard it onto the floor.

Kaiba breathed heavily through his nose, eyes alight with fury and darting like a clear tell his brain was working overtime. He could count on Kaiba to do that, Jounouchi thought dimly, slowly feeling himself descend to the floor before Kaiba grabbed ahold of his arms again.

“Sit,” he ordered. Seethed. While lowering him into the only upright kitchen chair, facing the counters. “ _Don’t touch anything._ ”

Jounouchi felt like he was nodding.

Kaiba promised to be right back. Jounouchi decided to believe him. Didn’t think to ask why.

Time was as unfocused as his mind. When Kaiba stepped back into the apartment, he shut the door firmly and locked it, looking calmer but his eyes were still frantic. “Bleach,” he said.

Jounouchi blinked, and repeated, voice raw. “Bleach.” That was a question. “Uh… Under the sink…”

“Gloves?”

He stared. “Gloves?”

“Yes, Jounouchi, _gloves_.” He made a grasping gesture to make his point, in his agitation, and spoke like he was talking to a child, but Jounouchi just stared at his fingers. “Do you want me to clean this up or not? I am not going to prison for you!”

In other words: if Kaiba Seto was going to do something, he was going to do it right.

His chest burned but his eyes focused a little more. “Under the sink,” he said.

Kaiba rolled his eyes before he crossed the room.

Jounouchi could only watch Kaiba in morbid fascination, without doing much in the way of thinking―silent, unmoving, he felt paralyzed all the way from his brain to his toes―as he reached through the mess of miscellaneous supplies in the cabinet to pull out cleaners, rags, a bucket, a trash bag…

His head spun in a way he felt his neck might snap. Bile rose―

“Jounouchi.”

Hands on his shoulders again, but he couldn’t focus for shit.

“Go clean up. I’ll take care of this.”

Someone else was nodding for him again. Couldn’t be bothered to move his legs, though. Instead, Kaiba all but dragged him out of the chair, into the short hallway that led only to two bedrooms and the bathroom.

Jounouchi wondered, distantly, if that last stick of glass to his father’s chest had transported him to a different dimension, where he was made to sit on the lid of the toilet and watch Kaiba start a shower for him, take off his shoes, and then tell him to leave his clothes on the floor.

“What?” Jounouchi blinked rapidly. His brain seared.

“We’ll have to burn them later.” Kaiba did not pause in his speech or his steps, until he was halfway out the door, casting a glance back, “Wait until you can stand first. Don’t hurt yourself.”

“Uh… okay…” It took an abysmally long time for him to catch up, spinning and empty. He stared at the closed door for several minutes.

It felt like an hour.

He wasn’t sure when he’d made the effort to stand up, undress, so that he was standing under the shower head. His legs felt like phantoms and he kept a hand on the cold wall to stop his wobbling, while watching the streams of red trickle down into the drain. It was only vaguely sobering.

Maybe he was the corpse. He felt like one.

Or, maybe he should just be happy. He _could’ve_ been the corpse.

He stood under the water motionlessly until it started to run cold and his body prickled and shivered, covered in goosebumps and all of the sudden he felt his jagged cuts burning hell through his skin again―though he might not have thought to check exactly where they all were if not for seeing them ooze and drip down onto the tile after he’d already stepped out of the tub.

There was a first-aid kit under the sink.

His clothes were not. He grabbed something used out of the laundry basket sitting haphazardly behind the door before the cold cut his skin into pieces.

Still in a fog, Jounouchi stepped aimlessly into the hallway and was greeted to the indescribably weird sight of Kaiba cleaning his kitchen: on his hands and knees with a rag, mussed hair, and a face mask on. He didn’t get to take it in for long, though, Kaiba ever-vigilant and all―gaze locking on-target and he pointed and snapped, “ _Out._ Until I come get you.”

Yes, a different dimension, that had to be it. Or a distant dream. 

That would also explain the sensation of wearing a stranger’s body as skin, lying on his bed and staring up at a familiar yellowed ceiling for what felt like hours. He wondered when he would feel like crying. Or vomiting.

Blood. So much blood. Glass shattering. His entire body burned. Glass ripping his skin open and anger running so deep it burned his soul, it swallowed up his flesh, his blood, his life―

His life flashed before his eyes.

His eyes were open. White blurred to the same yellowed ceiling. He jerked up, to the same walls with the peeling paint and spackle, a mess of books and clothes strewn on a desk on the other side of the room, a hole in the wall where he’d lost his temper for the umpteenth time―

“ _Jounouchi_.”

―and Kaiba.

If he hadn’t just hallucinated everything up to the present second, Kaiba was leaning beside him, a hand gripped on his shoulder. He was wearing different clothes.

“Jounouchi, wake up,” he said sharply. “It’s time to leave.”

Jounouchi blinked up at him, staring, until Kaiba sighed heavily and pulled him to his feet. But then, he was oddly familiar with those black jeans. Heart thumping a little bit faster, up to his throat, he found it a challenge to ask, feeling raw, and dumb, “Are you wearing my…”

Kaiba stopped, for the slightest of moments. “I didn’t exactly have the forewarning to bring a spare change of clothes," he said. "I’ll replace them later.”

Before he peeled away, Jounouchi held onto his arm, mindlessly pressing the fabric between his thumb and forefinger as if trying to come to some conclusion, until Kaiba’s eyes snapped up to his, lips pressed in a hard line. “Is this really important right now?”

His chest burned again. Frayed the ends of his nerves until he felt twitchy. Only the ghost of his thoughts shook his head, meanwhile, he found himself pulling on the collar of his own jacket to try to answer a distant voice’s question of: what would it feel like to kiss Kaiba?

Their lips met but he could only determine for himself that Kaiba smelled like bleach right now, maybe a little sweat, and tasted vaguely of coffee, which was not much of a discovery. But a rush of blood to his brain betrayed his question, drowning in its own muck. Kaiba's lips were dry and statue-like.

Actually, he was entirely rigid.

Jounouchi realized this only after the burn of a handprint seared across his cheek. His head swiveled, though he was transfixed on the anger in Kaiba’s eyes that threatened to turn him into kindling.

_Fuck._

“ _Pull yourself together._ ” His voice cut the air like a knife, the blue in his eyes almost black, and Jounouchi stood numbly in the middle of his room, watching his figure retreat into the hallway.

A jacket was thrown in his face.

“Get in the car.”

-

The image was burned into his brain.

The door to the apartment swinging open and in the doorway, Jounouchi, and blood: blood spattering his clothes, running down his face, painting the ends of his hair, the huge gash in his hand that left a bright, wet print on his coat.

That far-away look of terror on his face.

His voice had trembled with… something on the phone. Not like his panicked rambling in person.

 _“I couldn’t think of anyone else who’d get it,”_ he’d said. _“How much you can fuckin’ hate your own damn father.”_

He quickly realized his mistake. _“I know he wasn’t your real…”_

The scars on Seto’s back screamed.

_“Please.”_

Now, looking at Jounouchi was… unsettling. Like a shell with no soul.

He felt like he’d left his own body to be able to handle this.

He was desensitized to a lot of things. Whether or not a bloody corpse full of glass shards was one of them was up for debate. What else would you call babysitting Jounouchi―or, his husk―bleaching the blood out of his house, planning a 3-day alibi so they could drive out to the middle of nowhere and burn the bastard’s body that was rolled into a rug, and… 

No one had seen him dry heave into the sink. There was no going back now. It had to be done.

A few calls to Yugi and Mokuba were made, with a story he’d run through his head about a hundred times in the hours spent wiping all the evidence off of the apartment floors and walls, until his hands were raw and stained chalky, followed by a quiet dismissal of ever-loyal Isono who never asked questions, not when Seto sent him to get a rental car with an accommodating trunk using cash and a fake name, and not when he needed help getting the covered carcass down three flights of stairs. But that wasn’t the hard part.

His brain operated quickly, efficiently, like a computer running a string of code or mathematical problems, but it didn’t work so well when it came to people, for the same reason AI could never truly replace a living, human being. Right now Seto felt like an AI being presented with an emotional problem.

Jounouchi had blood on his hands, and he was running on pure steam and adrenaline. He’d spent no real time processing this, between shutting down for an extended period of time just to get up and crash again. Passing out for several hours and then waking like a zombie, doing something so gratuitously stupid that Seto could not restrain himself from knocking that cloudy look off of his face.

Maybe losing his grip on reality was his way of coping with killing his own father. In other words: he was a fucking mess. Seto could hardly stay angry at him. They had more important things to worry about.

Jounouchi slouched to his left in the passenger seat, had been for the last hour. He stared off into the distance somewhere between the windshield and the window, looking something like the shadow of a sullen child under the drooping hood of his jacket. The winter sky was more or less, a black hole, and whatever light made it through colored him pale, tired, something ghostly.

Jounouchi barely moved since getting in the car, but now he shifted, just barely, when they made eye contact. Seto fixed his gaze back on the road in the time it took Jounouchi to inevitably open his mouth again. When he did, he sounded like he hadn’t in days.

“Why are you helping me?”

“Why did you call me?” Seto countered.

Silence.

Jounouchi moved again, restlessly. “I figured none of my friends were fucked up enough to handle this,” he said quietly. And then, “I didn’t want to do that to them.”

Seto couldn’t help but laugh, though it dripped with something bitter. “How noble of you.”

He felt Jounouchi staring at him. “I didn’t mean…”

Sparing a glance, Seto saw him slouching further in his seat, where he expected irritation. “Don’t,” he muttered. He didn’t want any apologies. “I’m not disagreeing with you.”

Not in so many words.

As if any of Jounouchi’s friends would have an appropriate reaction. Appropriate in the eyes of the most common person’s moral compass, certainly, but in a way that would actually help? No. Seto would help, he would bury this corpse under the rug, burn it, and feel not one drop of regret for the rest of his life.

“Okay. So, I answered your question, you answer mine,” Jounouchi said. “We’re not exactly friends… or that’s what you keep sayin’.”

Seto scoffed. “If your definition of being friends is helping you dispose of a body, then by all means.”

“Kaiba.”

This felt more familiar. Like it was yesterday and they were sharing some sort of hypothetical dark joke.

“You’re the one who called and used Gozaburo as a trigger. Why do you think?” 

“Don’t tell me what I think,” Jounouchi snapped (there it was), “just answer the damn question, without the bullshit.” In his peripheral vision, Jounouchi threw out an arm, and then quietly slumped back again. “Wouldn’t you say we’re past that now?”

His eyes hardened at the road, pitch black if not lit up only by passing cars and a light coat of snow. Maybe Jounouchi was right. What was the point of skirting around questions anymore when there was a dead body in the trunk that only the two of them know about? He tensed and flexed his fingers over the steering wheel while he tried to contemplate, exactly, why he was doing this. 

He didn’t know the whole story, but he knew enough. His parents got divorced, and left him with the short end of the stick. A raging alcoholic, if that apartment could tell a story. “I don’t care to see you go to prison when this was everyone’s fault but your own.”

He thought (hoped) Jounouchi would be silent after that. He wasn’t.

“Despite everything else?”

Everything else. The last two years whispered in the back of his mind, but it was just noise right now. “Yes.”

At the sound of more shuffling around, Seto allowed himself to glance over again to see Jounouchi settling in a slightly more comfortable way, gazing out the window, a bit more… awake than he had been in the last four hours.

“Guess you’re not such a bastard after all.”

Dully incredulous, Seto retorted with the first thing that came to mind, “Why? Because I’m helping you get away with murder?”

Jounouchi snorted. “Yeah, guess so.”

Despite himself, he fought a pull at the corner of his mouth.

-

“So what did you tell Yugi?”

Two hours later, Seto dug his fingers into the leather of the steering wheel at the sound of Jounouchi ripping open a plastic bag of chips―obviously ¥5,000 in the wrong hands of an overgrown child, like this was a damn road trip.

Jounouchi met his glare with a tired look. “What?”

“Must you?”

He merely shrugged, and continued to pull at the seams until it popped open and little pieces of salted junk scattered on his lap. “Gimme a break. I’m eating my feelings.”

Seto stared at him, at a loss for Jounouchi’s strange moods. “Dissociation, more like.”

“Or that.” He echoed Seto’s monotone. “Whatever fancy bullshit you wanna call it. I guess you would know.” He missed Seto grinding his teeth for that one. “So. What did you tell Yugi?”

He untightened his jaw and fixated back on the road before responding. “I told him a half-truth. That I have a business meeting out of town and begrudgingly agreed to let you tag along because you were desperate to get out of your house.”

Jounouchi eyed him, for what seemed like quite a long time, before sitting up a little straighter. “Okay… What’s the half-truth? Don’t tell me you’re actually gonna go to a fucking business meeting after we dump the body off somewhere.”

“The half-truth is that I didn’t tell him you needed to get out of your house so we can _burn_ the body,” Seto said dryly, casting him a sideways glance. He was always the type to wear his heart on his sleeve, so Seto found Jounouchi uncharacteristically hard to read right now: unexpressive, a little bit lost… or maybe _gone_ was the right word.

Semantics were pointless, though. He only had himself for reference.

“Huh. So, you’re saying, my old man’s gonna go up in flames, like your, uh―well, you know.”

Jounouchi’s remark was more than a few notes off the mark there, but that wouldn’t stop the inspired boil of anger rising in his chest. “Considering we can’t _build a monument over his carcass and detonate it_ , this will have to do.”

In this instance, Seto’s tongue spat faster than he could check himself, and he cursed inwardly. There was no telling how Jounouchi would react to anything anymore―he kept flipping switches, panicking, hollowing out, misattribution, disassociation―but when Seto yet again expected anger to be a more natural response, Jounouchi… burst into uncontrollable laughter.

It rang like any other time he laughed, as if Yugi had said something corny, or if Honda hurt himself, or if Seto himself had even meant it as a joke in the first place rather than scathing reimbursement. He was a bit hysterical, shaking in his seat, practically shaking the car―and then he choked on his food because he didn’t have the common sense to chew and swallow before he opened his big mouth.

“You’re such an idiot.” Despite his own irritation, Seto found himself mildly alarmed, taking his foot off the gas and reaching over to find his shoulder, “Are you―?”

Jounouchi immediately waved at him, still shaking. “I’m good,” he said rawly, snorted, which only caused another barrage of coughs. Once he was finally done flailing, Seto sighed, rolled his eyes, and peeled his hand away.

A ghosting of fingers brushed against his as he did so.

He didn’t actually _see_ it, though, so he filed the phenomenon away along with a clutch in his chest; fixing his twitching fingers back onto the wheel instead.

They were sore within the next half-hour of driving, but he attributed that to scrubbing kitchen tile.

-

Feelings, right now, they swelled and faded.

Trying to think about _what_ they were doing, why, and god forbid _how_ , it brought the sensation of loud white noise to his ears, and left listlessness. He went back and forth between wanting to feel nothing and wanting to feel _something_.

Smoking was feeling nothing.

Not that Jounouchi was much of a smoker. He got enough of that smell baked into the apartment walls. But it had been a bad habit in middle school, and hell, if the situation didn’t call for it to make a comeback. And hell if he didn’t want to _not_ think about things right now.

The anxiety and other rotten feelings bound up in his chest, though; they didn’t blow out and swivel into the icy air like the smoke did. Just unclenched for a moment. He shifted his feet aimlessly, listened to the thin blanket of snow crunch pathetically under his sneaker with the hole in it, and let his mind wander back inside the car.

It was midnight, on the side of an empty road, and the only light in the vicinity were the little blips of neon from the dashboard. It had been that way long enough (save for the headlights while the car was running) that it didn’t matter if he couldn’t see Kaiba’s face: eyes with a practiced intensity and focus they could bore holes through anything that met his gaze… but they were a touch off tonight. Tired, face a shade paler, frown a bit less harsh as if he was resigned to having years taken off his life.

Not that Jounouchi was much good at reading people. Kaiba was, at the least, more considerate in his own heavy-handed ways tonight than any other time they’d known each other. It was a novelty, really, that it took a dead body to get here.

Since Jounouchi had the worst luck, sometimes he thought it might be fun to test it.

Half the cigarette quashed under his foot, he blew out the last breath of smoke and sidled back into his seat after toeing around on the gravel for a moment. Mechanically, Kaiba turned the keys in the ignition, in time for Jounouchi to ask, “So… what if I’d asked you first, instead of just goin’ for it like a total jackass?”

He hadn’t thought to be clearer about his choice of words, but the engine of the car sputtered and Jounouchi liked to imagine that sound was Kaiba’s brain understanding exactly what he meant. Slowly, and then suddenly Kaiba’s eyes met his like a knife with an edge of suspicion. “I swear, if you try to kiss me again while you reek of cigarette smoke I won't be able to stop myself from punching you in the teeth.”

Jounouchi clicked his tongue loudly and fell back in his seat, though he didn’t squirm away like Kaiba probably wanted him to, leaning an elbow on the console. “Uh-huh. So is that a ‘maybe’ in Kaiba-speak, if it wasn’t for the fucking cigarette?”

“ _Jounouchi._ ”

“ _What?_ ”

“Look at me.”

He did, and if it was possible Kaiba’s eyes were more soul-stabbing than before.

“Your father is dead.”

Kaiba lingered carefully on each word as if he were drilling them individually into Jounouchi’s brain.

Why did he feel the need to say that? Jounouchi’s stomach twisted with irritation. “Yeah, I think I picked up on that.”

While he slouched back into his seat, it was a bit startling to have Kaiba reach over and grab him by the jaw, jerking him back around to force the eye contact and Jounouchi’s blood burst into a fire in a way that felt morbidly alive again. “Kaiba, what the fuck? I get it!”

“ _Your father_ ,” Kaiba seethed, pupils burning holes into Jounouchi’s face, “is _dead_. You killed him! He’s in the trunk, full of little pieces of glass―

“ _Fucking shut up!_ ”

“―and he’s fucking dead, and you have to accept that!”

Jounouchi broke out into a cold sweat and a blazing anger all at once and it made him want to throw up. He yanked himself out of Kaiba’s grip, threw himself out of the car and stalked off into the darkness with tunnel vision.

There was nothing out there: not except for the headlights far off into the distance, mostly on the other side of the highway, loose rocks, snow and ice that slipped under his feet, but he kept going, hunched forward in his jacket and hands jammed in its pockets. He wished he had something to punch, to hurt, to break, so he didn’t have to feel the guttural twisting of his insides, but there was nothing.

Nothing stretched on for a long time, until his foot slipped, and he stumbled down the hill beside the road and his knees caught his fall and he wanted to finally cry but it didn’t happen. His bandaged hands and his fingers met the wet sludge of the ground and he wanted to vomit but it didn’t happen.

Jounouchi screamed instead, until he felt like his throat went raw and the pain bled water from his eyes. He slammed his fist into a rock. It throbbed dully. It wasn’t enough. The darkness was claustrophobia at its finest, leaving him hyperventilating into his knees until the pressure in his chest might decide to mercifully subside. And then maybe rewind time back to before he got home to his apartment, before the bottle hurtled across the room and shattered into his shoulder, and before he gripped one of the shards like a knife.

His cognition was blurred, unsure if it had been minutes or hours, when his face and neck burned from the cold, slowly creeping through his jacket, and when the crunch of snow and rocks from behind, quiet as it was. Should’ve startled him, but it didn’t.

The sound stopped, a few meters away, and silence pervaded for a bit longer.

“Are you finished yet?”

The prickling sensation brought Jounouchi’s mind back to the surface, though he found it a struggle to say anything without his throat protesting. “You have the work fucking bedside manner ever,” he mumbled into his knees.

“If you wanted someone with a good beside manner, you would’ve called someone else,” Kaiba said.

“You didn’t have to go that far.”

“You’ve been in and out of a stupor all night. I don’t think smacking you would’ve worked a second time.”

“Fuck, Kaiba.” There were so many things he could’ve said to that right now, but he didn’t have the pent-up energy anymore to let it out. Jounouchi sighed until his shoulders didn’t feel like rocks, and lifted his head just to stare out into the darkness. “Tell me how I’m supposed to act, then, since you fucking know everything.”

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

“Then what are you doing?”

Kaiba didn't have an immediate response. Jounouchi wasn’t sure he’d ever heard him at a loss for words, and that inspired enough curiosity to turn to look at him. Except he only saw a darker shadow on top of hazy shadows. Damn, he wished he could adjust to the dark already. “I don’t know,” Kaiba eventually mumbled. He may have shrugged. “Anything that might work. Come back to Earth, Jounouchi. Preferably before you freeze out here.”

Jounouchi chewed on that for a moment. If he was still on Earth (he may not have been at this point), Kaiba was being sincere. And this was his way of trying to help. “Kaiba… you got a really shitty way of telling somebody you care about them.”

He heard a tongue click. “I’ve done _far_ more than necessary.” He quickly changed his tone to that of an indignant guardian. “Let’s go, already. You’ve been out here for 30 minutes and it’s -10 degrees.”

“Make it 32 minutes,” he muttered, absently rubbing his throat and wondering if it might actually be bleeding. “And… can you stop _looming_?”

“I’m not…” Kaiba’s retort was extinguished by a long sigh. Several minutes may have already passed by the time he relented. “Fine. Two minutes.”

Jounouchi couldn’t help feeling like he’d won something, even if it turned out to be nothing more than a petty argument. Two petty arguments in one, when Kaiba actually sat down with him. Well, near him. Not too close. He used up about ten seconds of his allotted time to take a shot in the dark and ask, “How did you feel when your parents died?”

About ten more seconds passed while he felt Kaiba staring at him. “My real parents,” he said, confirming, tone flattening.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Humor me while you’re feeling charitable.” He rested his head back in his arms folded over his knees, starting to feel the energy fade away again.

“You can’t compare this, Jounouchi. Not to my parents and not to―”

“I know.”

Kaiba went quiet again and Jounouchi had to wonder if he was actually keeping the time or not. (Probably.) If he was, though, he eventually, reluctantly, said, “My mother died when I was nine. I only had a few months to process it before my father killed himself.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Everyone told me it was just a car accident, but I knew better,” Kaiba said, with a lack of affect that made Jounouchi itch under his skin. “Don’t say anything to Mokuba.”

“Why would I―” He raked a shaky hand through his hair and exhaled. “Fucking shit, Kaiba, you don’t have to make it sound like you’re reading a eulogy in the newspaper or something.”

“You asked, I answered.” Kaiba’s voice tightened. “It was nearly ten years ago, and I had to write it off when the rest of our family dumped us off at an orphanage.”

“Yeah, but I asked how you felt, not the cold, hard facts.”

“I felt nothing.”

Jounouchi sat up straighter, let his legs unfold out to the ground, but he still couldn’t see for shit. “I don’t believe you.”

“I had Mokuba to worry about.” He felt Kaiba piercing him with eye contact again. “If you’re trying to find something to empathize with, you’d be better off asking how I felt when Gozaburo killed himself just to spite me.” He heard fabric shifting and loose pebbles as Kaiba stood. “But the answer would still be nothing, Jounouchi. I can’t help you sort out your feelings.”

No. That was obvious.

If anything, Jounouchi felt wholly worse for the experience, but he couldn’t help the accompanying feeling of being the one who wanted to reach out now. Maybe that was his way of dealing with things, who knew. He stumbled to his feet. “Kaiba.”

“Hurry up. You’re going to get sick out here.”

Jounouchi was wasting his breath, he was completely sure of that, but he grabbed ahold of his arm, anyway. If just to stop Kaiba from gaining strides on him. “You know you can’t do that shit forever. One of these days, you’re just gonna…” He chewed on his gums to search for a word, but the cold had numbed everything, including his brain.

“Combust?” Kaiba suggested, drawing Jounouchi’s gaze in the darkness, even if he could hardly make out half of his disassociated face by a weak reflection of light.

“Yeah… something like that.”

“You would know.” The words were devoid of any real bite; that and Kaiba retracting from him just long enough to pull the hood of his parka over his head and yank the zipper up to his chin made Jounouchi confused over whether to take it as a spiteful or fond gesture. Maybe both. Kaiba _was_ the master of sending mixed messages.

Jounouchi was too numb, though, in body and mind, to argue about it, or when Kaiba dragged him back up the slope, to the road, to the car.

He slept the next three hours away.

-

Kaiba told him to stay in the car, but damn if Jounouchi didn’t want to feel like he was being carried. Even if he had yet to shake the sensation of floating above his own body, multiplied by the hard, unrestful sleep and the frigid air.

They carried the musky mound of the rug that once laid under the ugly couch in his living room far out from the highway, beside a lake, and dropped it at the bank. Well, Jounouchi dropped it. The reflection of the moon off the water provided him enough light to catch a glimpse of the rug unfurling and revealing a sickly face drained of blood except where it was spattered across his dead features.

It was like looking at a bad movie stand-in, but that didn’t stop Jounouchi from finally retching. Kaiba, with all his terrible bedside manner, once again tried to banish him to the car, and once again Jounouchi refused.

Kaiba was, though, quite resolute not to let Jounouchi near the prep work, citing his clumsiness―this mostly involved drenching the body and the clothes they’d been wearing earlier that afternoon in gasoline, but it was probably a good call considering he’d dropped the body there in the first place.

Jounouchi threw in his carton of poison sticks for good measure. Symbolism and shit. If he had a shit to give right now over the deep, aching numbness. His mediocre attempt to distract himself from the next task, lighting one last cigarette he’d kept for himself, however, was thwarted by Kaiba, who swiped it out of his hand, away from his lips, like a playing card.

Instead of tossing it, Kaiba balanced it between his fingers, with a tilt of his head, as if silently offering Jounouchi the honors. Jounouchi found himself at a loss, for argument or otherwise, and clumsily brushed their fingers together when he pried it back.

But damn, if the blaze of fire didn’t sweep through his body like a powerful force of release. Of what, he wasn’t sure, but suddenly he felt like he could exhale and float away into the atmosphere like embers.

When it felt like he’d been staring into the fire for hours, he stuffed his hands into his pockets and dropped his gaze to the pulsing glow at their feet. When he felt himself starting to feel woozy, he took a last shot in the dark to ground himself by leaning his body into Kaiba’s.

Mercifully, Kaiba let him.

-

Jounouchi tossed the lit cigarette arbitrarily toward the dead mass soaked in gasoline, and when it went up in flames, Seto mentally checked it off of his list.

Cleaning the apartment was the most strenuous task, and everything after this would take the utmost care, but this―for as far away Seto was from feeling emotional about Jounouchi’s dead father, this would take a weight off his chest. It would be nice to drive without the knowledge of a dead body in the trunk, he thought wryly, when he really only hoped Jounouchi would be able to breathe easier now.

He watched the fire grow and descend with the biting wind and wondered if Jounouchi would bury this in himself, only to combust again later, or if this, in fact, felt at all like Seto destroying Gozaburo’s island in a blaze of glory that only brought a shadow of catharsis.

Seto waited for Jounouchi to break down. Or vomit again. Crumple in on himself. He stood and watched the fire like a husk, instead, which was more unnerving than the alternatives―so when he finally fell into a full-body sigh and leaned into his side, Seto let him.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Edit: I never expected to get so many comments on anything I posted, thank you?? If you left me a comment and I didn't reply, I really do appreciate it!! I just don't know what to say sometimes or I'm afraid of repeating myself, or I've waited too long ;-; but thank you so much


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